SEO OPTIMAL

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2010-01-04T18:06:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Posted: 03 Jan 2010 09:24 PM PST

Social Media is like having a conversation over the back fence with your neighbours. It could also be like getting that unexpected phone call from an old high school friend and catching up. Social Media is laid back and conversational. Many individuals and businesses that enters the Social Media Marketing arena fails to market themselves, their services or products because they are trying to hard.

Find below the most common mistakes marketers make when entering Social Media Marketing.

Self promoting

Only promoting yourself and not providing value is a huge mistake. The Social Media world is all about entering into the conversation and participation. There’s thousands of companies entering Twitter, blogging and social networking that spends all their energy and resources to market themselves. This is a sure way to get people to run the other direction.

Not listening

Social Media is supposed to be conversational. This means that two or more people listening and then interacting. If you only focus on broadcasting yourself, services or products, then you are not engaging at a social level. The building of relationships requires listening to understand the other person’s point of view.

Not conversational

Never try to control and force your point of view. Your goal is to build trust, listen and understand the other person’s viewpoint. Of course you want to voice your own point of view, but avoid criticizing and offending. Avoid being to formal, boring and proper. Interact and let your personality show.

Too much participation

If you try and participate in too many forms and channels of social media, your participation becomes spotty and inconsistent. You may experiment with a wide range of tools. Find the few areas that you really enjoy and that you are good at. Settle in on your favourites and focus on them. You will enjoy it more and build better relationships.

Giving up after a short time

Social Media Marketing is about creating and sustaining lasting relationships. It takes time,dedication and many conversations. Social Media is not the instant solution. Be prepared for a long term commitment or don’t bother with it at all.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Social Media Marketing or if you know of any other mistakes that people/companies encounters with Social Media.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-28T18:17:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Target your audience to increase your readership

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 11:07 PM PST

Targeting your message to the right audience is the key to growing your readership and at the same time reaching interested people. By directing and targeting your message to the people most interested will greatly increase the number of readers that will actually read your website or blog and respond. It sounds like a contradiction, but it is true.

Targeting your audience is a form of online and website marketing.

I always ask my clients who their targeted market is. Many times I get the response of “everyone”. They are actually saying “I don’t want to exclude anyone, because they might be interested”. The sad truth is that they will spend much more money and reach fewer interested people without targeting. People naturally want to read something that is meant for them.

The two most important parts of targeting is based on demographics and attitudes.

Attitudes

These are the psychological or personality factors. What is the target market's attitude regarding the company's product? How do they arrive at the purchase decision? These include price, fashion, status, latest technology, etc.

Demographics

This describes who your customer or audience is. This includes things such as age, gender, occupation, education level, lifestyle, nationality, etc.

By knowing your audience, you can write in a way that catches their attention and draws them in. This is how you increase the interest in and conversion rate for a website.

Let's look at an example:

Price Shopper: There are many people in this world that shop based on price alone. Their attention will be grabbed by special deals, discounts and sales. They need to see a price related call-to-action. They need to see your special offer the second they arrive or they will wander off in search of a better deal. They will sign up for newsletters that announce sales. Even the design of the website should be simple and use bright active colors. This works well for products such as cell phones, printer cartridges, etc.

What ever your message, your product or service, it will be best received by those that are already interested. If you write in a way that is directed to your targeted audience, you will get more readers and more results.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding website marketing

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-23T18:16:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009, 2010 and beyond

Posted: 23 Dec 2009 12:09 AM PST

It’s almost the end of December and I can’t believe how fast this year has gone by. This year has been quite full of surprises with the economic crisis and all. Can’t believe Christmas is on Friday! Holiday time for me!

This year has been full of achievements and downfalls both personally and business wise.

I think I’ll just mention a couple of things I did business wise and keep the personal ones to close friends and family. Don’t want to write a 10 part blog series.

Open Circle Solutions has grown over the last year and we will step into 2010 with a bang! Busy working on a project that I will announce soon!

I’ve been offered a great position a couple of months ago as a Social Media Manager in a big international internet marketing franchise and it’s been going great. It’s quite nice to see what the social media impact can be for big companies. I have also done allot of project management for them and will most likely focus allot on that in the near future.

This year I have already developed and configured 38 websites where roughly 16-17 are blogs. Why can’t you just install an open source system out of the box with all the bells and whistles? Why do I always need to fix the code? Feels like I have been a developer since I was born and I don’t think I’ll ever stop. It always finds me.

This year I have written over 340 blog posts on all my personal and business blogs and written many (too lazy to count) articles on other Web 2.0 sites spread around the world. Maybe I should become a full time content writer or just write a book “Social media South Africa“… sounds too familiar on something else that I’m trying to do.

It’s been a fun year and I can’t wait for the holidays. Going down to the wild coast with a couple of friends. Will most likely write a couple of blog posts while I’m there.

2010 and beyond

Plans, plans, plans! I believe 2010 is going to be a great year. Once again business and personal wise. My wife and I decided to start with a family and I’m planning to grow Open Circle Solutions even more.

What have you done in 2009 that you are proud of and what are you planning for 2010?

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-20T18:08:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Social Media, Web 2.0 and SEO – Everything has changed

Posted: 20 Dec 2009 01:55 AM PST

Blogs, Wikis, Web 2.0, Social Networking and the changing of search algorithms has changed the search engine optimization industry. What worked well a few years ago, does not work that good now. With all the changes, content and link popularity is still critical to get top SEO results with the transition into Web 2.0.

The rules for SEO keeps on changing and evolving as search engines constantly improve their search algorithms. Why all the changes? It is quite simple; most of the search engines makes their money through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords. Better quality search results will bring more people to the search engines and this brings in more advertising money.

Search Engine Optimization

A while back it was all about building quality links and waiting for the search engines to discover and index your content. This was a slow process and many people in the website marketing industry still believes this is the only way to get your website indexed. They are wrong!

With the transition into Web 2.0 (Social Media), it is easier to get your content noticed and be read by interested people.

What has stayed the same?

The foundation for SEO is still quality content with keywords. I’m not talking about the keywords found in the meta tags for a specific page, but how relevant the keywords are in the content, links, anchor text of the page,etc. Choosing the right keywords that accurately describe your services or products that also have visitor traffic is at the heart of SEO. By optimizing “visible text” with keywords and phrases is very important for SEO.

Web 2.0 and Blogs

The search engines (talking about Google again), adores blogs. A blog together with the right Social Media Optimization is a powerful way to increase the search engine rankings of a website or online profile. If you haven’t yet embraced Web 2.0 or blogging, you are behind the times.

Link rich blogs is a very important part of building link popularity and it should be considered by any business that is seriously working on promoting and optimizing their website. In addition to link popularity, blogs are responsible for introducing new content at an ever accelerating rate.

Blog marketing, corporate blogs, Web 2.0, Social Media is at the heart of the new SEO.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-17T18:17:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

The difference between SEO and SEM

Posted: 17 Dec 2009 03:09 AM PST

Many people are confused because there are two phrases in the Website marketing community working together and they are often used interchangeably. They are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

There is a big difference between SEO and SEM. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a broader term; it includes all the strategies for promoting your website on the search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a method of getting a website ranked in the organic or natural search results.

There is 3 types of SEM:

Organic SEO

This is a process of improving your website’s rankings naturally. Some considers this as part science and part art. It prepares a web page to be found for certain keywords and key phrases. Organic (natural) SEO uses keyword phrases prominently on the website page itself (body text, headings, links, etc). This is usually coupled with a link building strategy.

Local search

This also uses organic SEO methods mixed with state, zip codes and city. These geo factors bring in searchers looking for local business. This can include Google’s directory and profile listings as well as other local directories.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

This the advertising on Google and other search engines. These advertisements come up based on the keyword query and they appear under the sponsored results. You only pay for visitors that clicks through to your websites. This includes Yahoo!, Bing (Microsoft adCenter) and Google Adwords.

There are other types of website marketing that can be used to promote your website and business with the search engines.

Social Media Marketing

SMM (social media marketing) includes blog marketing, Micro blogging (Twitter), social networking and more. You can set up profiles on popular social networking (Web 2.0) sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. You can publish your own blog or participate in online discussions as an expert.

Article marketing

Write and publish educational articles and place them on article syndication websites. Other website owners can publish them on their websites. Links in the bottom resource box will lead interested people to your website.

To get the best results from your Internet marketing efforts, multiple SEM and SEO methods should be used. Traffic strategies needs to be devised when a website is the planning process. Search Engine Optimization works pest when it is planned into the website structure rather than added later.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-15T18:06:00.000+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Search Engine Optimization Blogging Tips

Posted: 14 Dec 2009 09:37 PM PST

Business blogs should always use special SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to get fast results. Blogs (Web 2.0) have a great advantage over standard websites because of the amount of new and fresh content being generated and search engines adores them.

Find below a couple of Search Engine Optimization blogging tips to optimize your blog.

Keyword research

The first step in any website/blog optimization is choosing the correct keywords and keyword phrases. This is the foundation that all the other strategies are built upon. Research which keywords you will be targeting and use these in your titles, category names, tags and even the domain name.

Domain name

There are quite a couple of factors to keep in mind when selecting a domain name. Using keywords/phrases in the domain name is a powerful technique. This can also make your URL (blog address) more memorable so people can easily return.

Blog theme

Blog SEO is no different than normal SEO. If you want higher search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo or Bing, it’s important to stay with a highly focused blog theme and topic. Never mix your topics because it can hurt your rankings.

Title

Always write keyword rich posting titles. It almost goes without saying, but the post title is the most important part of your blog posts. The title is considered very important to the search engines and it will entice your readers.

Keyword rich content

Research and identify a couple of keywords for your article that you are hoping to get indexed highly by the search engines. Use these keywords 1-2 times in the first few paragraphs and not just in the ending paragraphs. Search engines places more value on the phrases found in the first part of the posting.

Quality content

You can find many link generating systems on the web but the best way to get links to your blog is to write quality unique content that people will want to read and that they find interesting. Write for humans but keep the search engines always in mind.

Inbound linking

Links that point to a website is one of the most powerful ways of climbing the search engine result pages. In fact, I believe it is the most important factor. Link the keywords you have chosen to the most relevant page on your website. This can boost your website rankings on the search engines.

Interlink your blog

This is the way search engines indexes your blog. Provide some sort of site map with links that are directly accessible. A good strategy is by creating a XML sitemap for search engines and a normal HTML sitemap for your readers.

Update regularly

The more often that you update your blog and create new content on it the more often search engines and other blog Aggregators will send crawlers to your blog to index it.

Write optimal length posts

There is some thought going around the Search Engine Optimization community that pages that are too short can get passed over for high rankings. Rubbish! I tend to keep my blog postings between 350-700 words. It doesn’t matter how long your postings are as long as it’s quality keyword content.

One topic per post

The more tightly focused the theme of a page is, the better search engines can rank it. Sometimes you might find yourself writing long posts that end up covering a a number of different topics. Keep it focused and to the point.

Blogging is a great way to boost your Search Engine Optimization rankings. Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding blog development or SEO.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-10T18:06:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Christmas Special: Blog Starter Kit

Posted: 09 Dec 2009 10:19 PM PST

It’s that time of the year again where people start winding down into the festive season and start celebrating all the good things in life. The festive season is all about giving, and that is what we have decided to do.

We have created a special on one of our top services and that is to offer a top notch state of the art business blog at a reduced price.

The special can be viewed here: Blog Starter Kit Christmas Special

Why blogging is important?

Well, first of all, with a blog you can build credibility and trust and at the same time market your services and products to every corner of the world, faster than you could have done with any normal website. Blogging (social media) is busy sweeping the business community by storm. Why not take part in this natural phenomena?

Blogging is a vital social media tool for any person or business. According to blog analysts Technorati, there are 79.2 million blogs worldwide, with 120,000 new blogs being created daily and about 1.5 million posts made each day. With numbers continuously rising, it is evident that blogs remain the most interesting and powerful opportunity for communication, news updates, education, personal publishing and political insights that has ever appeared.

People are tired of old traditional marketing methods where they cannot engage with the advertisements that is being broadcasted to them. With a blog, your existing clients and future prospects has the ability to interact in conversation with your services and products.

This is an excellent business opportunity as you can directly hear and monitor what your targeted customers needs are and what they think about your organization.

Blogging allows people to do what they most desperately need to do more than anything else on this earth… validating their opinion unilaterally.

Why is this an excellent special?

The blog will be search engine optimized by SEO Specialists and professional bloggers;
It will have a user friendly design;
It is quick and easy to get started;
You are not restricted to a limited amount of pages/posts (can be used as a CMS);
It is a low cost and quick to get up and running;
You can quickly reach your market segment and make them aware of your products and services;
You can be viewed as an expert and a market leader by your readers;
Improve your general website rankings;
Add a human face to your company and create a corporate personality;

How to get the Blog Starter Kit Christmas Special

Head over to the special Blog Starter Kit Christmas Special where you can view what is included in the special and then you can contact us to get it started.

The special is only available for a limited time period so take action now and go get it!

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-09T18:16:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

A successful blogging plan is like a road map

Posted: 09 Dec 2009 03:13 AM PST

A successful blogging plan is like a road map. Use your blogging plan to create focus and a purpose for your blog. Do you know where you're going with your blog? Do you have a plan or are you just making it up as you go?

If you want your blog to be successful, you must have a plan. If you don't have any idea where you're going, how will you get there? How will you know when you've arrived?

If you are in the process of developing your blog, a blogging plan is critical

What is your purpose for blogging?

To reach new prospects or markets?
Promote your services and products?
Visibility and branding?
Search engine rankings?
Be recognized as an expert?
Social networking and communication?

Successful blogging takes time and dedication. In my line of work, time = money. Why waste time when you aren’t getting any return out of it? To get the most out of your blog, find a couple of tips below to help you create a blog plan road map.

Who are you targeting?

Many times this is the same as your ideal customer. This can include things like age, gender, income, etc. What are their interests? Are they business owners? Use this kind of information to select topics and how you will communicate your ideas. With your blog, you can target selected people but it does require some research.

What will your topics be?

Your blog posts should always be interesting to the targeted audience you have selected and relevant to your business. Choose topics that you have a passion for and those that you are interested in. This way your enthusiasm will show and you will enjoy it more.

Keywords

Doesn’t matter how you look at it, search engines are always looking for relevant keywords and it is always about search engine optimization.

Choose keywords and selected keyword phrases that are relevant to your topic. Use these selected keywords in the title of your blog post as well as the content. Link these keywords that you have placed in your content to the most relevant page on your website to help your website search rankings.

Blogging schedule

Blog a minimum of three times a week if you want to develop an audience and get good results with the search engines. It’s the easiest if you set aside some dedicated time either every day or every second day to research and write blog topics.

Blogging can be fun so relax and enjoy it. Writing can be therapeutic and fun. It’s also quite exciting when you start engaging with others in conversation.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding blog development or if you would like to share your blogging plan.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-08T18:08:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

XML Sitemaps and SEO

Posted: 07 Dec 2009 09:41 PM PST

There’s quite a big split in the SEO and website development community about the importance of submitting an XML sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing. XML sitemaps do help websites that’s got a structural navigation and crawl-ability problems.

Most people in the SEO world needs to apply every possible advantage to a website to get better rankings. Others will focus on fixing complex structural issues and allow crawling to happen naturally. While an XML sitemap will not directly improve your search engine rankings, it does allow search engines such as Google to see any SEO based changes more quickly.

XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of submitting your website URL to search engines. You can now submit your XML sitemap directly to the search engines, or you can wait for the search engines to spider it.

Sitemap types

Complex websites should always have two kinds of sitemaps. One visible to your users for easy navigation to anywhere on your website and one for the search engines. An HTML sitemap is what you will use for the visible one for your users and a XML sitemap helps the search engines to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed and to crawl your site accordingly.

What is included in a XML Sitemap?

Links (URL’s) to all the pages on your website.
The relative importance of each page on your website.
The date each page was last modified.
How often each page is expected to change.

When to use a XML sitemap

On large dynamic websites that are poorly linked making them difficult to index.
On websites using large amounts of Ajax and Flash where the web crawlers have difficulty accessing the content.
For poorly coded websites (can name a few).
Any website that changes their content frequently like blogs, forums, CMS (content management systems).

XML sitemaps doesn’t directly affect SEO results but they do communicate important information to the search engines to help them index your website. My advice – always include a XML sitemap as part of your Website Development and SEO program.

Leave a comment below or contact us for more information regarding XML sitemaps and Website Development.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-07T18:04:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

How to increase your sales during a recession

Posted: 06 Dec 2009 10:28 PM PST

These days, for many businesses, offline and online times are tough. People are looking for value and ways to eliminate the unnecessary. Online and Website Marketing is a way to reach online communities via your website and to convert prospects into buyers. All you need to do is to make sure that your services or products is considered necessary. You also need to market smarter during hard times.

Online marketing is an effective and low cost way to increase your sales. Find below a couple of tips on how you can increase your sales online during a recession.

Call to Action

When new visitors arrive to your website, there needs to be a clear path to action. This always needs to be visible on the home page and should be clear to the visitor in the first few seconds of arrival. Your visitors should always know what your website is about and what steps to do next.

Pay Per Click

Well written pay per click advertising campaigns can rapidly increase your sales. To do this, increase your advertising budget and target your advertisements around geographical or other demographics. Create your advertisements around each of your specific products and then make sure the advertisement delivers the visitor to the specific page where you describe the product with a clear CTA (call to action) to make sure the visitor takes an action.

Blog Marketing

This is a powerful marketing tool and I believe every business should have one. With a blog you can broadcast your marketing messages to every corner of the world thanks to RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and other Web 2.0 tools. Your blog can also build trust and credibility and encourage conversation with your targeted customer. People will buy from businesses that they trust.

You can use your blog to strengthen your relationships, build your brand, develop a loyal readership and to get new customers. The key to effective blogging is to regularly write interesting original content that your targeted customer will be interested in. A major benefit of blogging is that it can dramatically improve your search engine rankings of your website.

Social Networking

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to name but a few are great Social Networking websites and tools where you can engage with other people that shares the same interests. Social Media Marketing is powerful and if done correctly, can increase visibility to your products and services drastically.

There are hundreds of social networking sites out there; many are focused around a topic, interest or particular group. Find one that your targeted customer is active in and participate yourself. This will envolve some research from your side to be done.

Stay in touch

Marketing to your past customers can also be a quick way to increase business leads and sales. Email marketing can keep them coming back to purchase other products. In most businesses, 80% of the sales come from 20% of the customers. Stay in touch with your biggest customers on a regular basis. You aren't trying to sell anything, you are just touching bases. You will be surprised on how much more business can come from this.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding online and Website Marketing.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-04T18:14:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Business and Social networking: You can mix the two

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 09:49 PM PST

Business networking is an important aspect for any existing and new business to grow. Networking can range from virtual online networking tools like blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter to face to face meetings.

Which form works the best? I have found that a mix of real and virtual networking (social networking) is best.

An important aspect to consider when networking is to research the age of your targeted customer. Once done, you can determine which way is best. Always match the preferences of your targeted customer with the networking strategies that you feel most comfortable with.

Determine the age group of your target customer that you would like to network with.

Baby Boomers

These are people in their 50’s and 60’s and will always prefer face to face meetings. They usually tend to be less comfortable with computer communication and they like to interact verbally and when possible, always in person.

Generation X

These are people in their 30’s and 40’s and they tend to be more comfortable with technology. They usually prefer keeping it simple and will most likely use LinkedIn and other business social networking tools to network with other people sharing the same interests.

Generation Y

These are people in their teens and 20’s and they are most comfortable in using all forms of technology. This is due to the fact that they have been exposed to technology most of their lives. They know what they want and they will find you. They usually have a good presence on Twitter and Facebook.

Targeting your message to your readers (business or social networking) is the key to growing your audience and reaching interested people. It may sound like a contradiction, but directing your message (sales pitch) to the people most interested will greatly increase the number of interested readers that will actually read your website or blog and respond.

How are you going to network?

Face to face networking

Face to face networking can include lead groups that meets your industry and niche. If you want to connect with senior level readers, attending a pricey plate dinner may be a better investment than attending a dozen networking breakfasts.

Many professional associations have terrific opportunities for face to face business networking.

Virtual Networking

There is thousands of good social networking tools and websites found online with new ones created every day. The best ones with some research, are those that can get you in front of your targeted customer. LinkedIn is a professional networking tool and it seems to be the most accepted internationally. Other popular tools includes Twitter and Facebook.

Leave a comment below or contact us if you require more information regarding business and social networking.

SEO and blogging, they do go hand in hand

Posted: 03 Dec 2009 03:24 AM PST

To have a business blog is very different than a personal blog. A business blog is done with a purpose. The marketing of this can be used as a powerful tool to improve website search engine rankings and increase targeted website traffic. More targeted traffic could only mean more business or sales leads

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about improving the rankings of your website in popular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. You can also SEO optimize your blog to bring more traffic to it. This is easy to do by using targeted keywords and key phrases in your blog titles, blog categories and in the first paragraph of your blog text.

Blogging

Some believe the online social media phenomena started with the birth of blogs. You can use your blog to raise the rankings of your business website. This is particularly effective if your blog is situated on the same domain as your website eg http://blog.opencircle.co.za/.

Even though it could also have benefits by hosting your blog on a separate domain, I have noticed that by combining the two on the same domain, you are indeed pushing the rankings up for the whole domain.

Blogging involves writing keyword rich content that is creative, compelling and original. Keywords are still used in the blog titles and categories and this also helps distinguishing if your content is relevant.

By using keyword phrases in the link text of your blog post and linking back to your website that is the most relevant is a very effective SEO method that can produce SEO results fast.

How many links should you include in a blog post? 3-5 links is a typical number of links. Be sure to include the occasional links to high PR authority websites such as Wikipedia. This could speed up the process of crawling your blog posts by the search engines.

Blogs traditionally have a large number of postings focused on a particular topic. The page code is often text rich HTML, and very clean. Blogs are usually written in a simple, easy to spider format making them an excellent natural SEO tool that cannot be ignored.

Leave a comment below or contact us if you require more information regarding Search Engine Optimization and Blog Development.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-02T18:18:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Create the best topics to blog about

Posted: 02 Dec 2009 12:10 AM PST

If you are in the process of starting up a blog for your business or developing a blog, the most basic answer you should ask yourself is “What topics should I write about?”

Marketing with your blog (Social Media), requires that you always write content that your clients/customers will find interesting.

Most blogging journeys begins by choosing the topics that your targeted audience will want read and that you enjoy to write about.

Write titles for your blog posts that will get your readers attention. The title of your blog posts is most likely the first thing people will read and notice about your blog in search engine results, Blog Aggregators, Social Media channels (Web 2.0) and feed readers.

To write the best and most effective topics, always answer these 3 questions.

Whom are you writing to?
What are they interested in?
Why are you writing?

Whom are you writing to?

This will be your targeted customer. Do you only want to reach people locally or internationally? What interests your targeted customer?

Do some research and look at other similar blogs in your industry. See what they are writing about and how they construct their blog titles and content. The best tips about blogging will usually come from other bloggers.

What are you interested in?

Write about a topic that you are knowledgeable and passionate about. It should always be a subject that your targeted customer is interested in.

To get the best results, focus on a narrow niche and yet broad enough so you can write for a long time and still not run out of things to say.

Why are you writing?

By writing interesting and informative content that your readers find useful, you are branding yourself as the expert in your field. By doing this you can attract new customers, improve your search engine rankings or promote your services and products. There must always be one primary objective to create a focus on what you write.

Now you are ready to select and create your blog topic. Remember to always write about topics that will reach people before they make the buying decision.

As an example, if you own a travel agency, you could write a blog about the travel destinations that you are promoting. People will generally start thinking about the destinations before thinking about the hotel accommodation, flight tickets, etc.

Why don’t you promote this information via your blog? This could be a great way to get people to make the buying decision.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Blogging or Social Media Marketing.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-12-01T18:16:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Social Media, Blogs and Relationship Marketing

Posted: 01 Dec 2009 01:13 AM PST

Relationship marketing involves the building of relationships with your potential customers. You can do this with Social Media, your website or direct communication with your clients.

Relationship marketing builds long term customers through regular communication. It has been proved that people prefer to buy from businesses/people that they trust. They will also keep doing business and stay with you for the same reason.

Usually companies spend 70-80% of their marketing budget going after new customers and clients rather that nurturing and retaining their current customers. By having solid relationships with their customers, businesses can increase repeat orders from existing clients.

Find a couple of tips below to help you with your relationship marketing.

Blog Marketing

With a blog, you can reach your readers regularly on a conversation level. Each day you can reach them with problem solving ideas, insights, business advice on how you can help them. You can engage with your readers in a blogging conversation. In my line of work, blog development is almost more important than normal website development.

Website

Design and develop your website to be relationship orientated. This means that you must invite your readers with your website by presenting a warm and friendly user experience. Offer your visitors free stuff in the form of tools, information and ebooks. Always show your hospitality.

A well developed FAQ (frequently asked questions) area makes it easy for people to find information quickly and get answers. Always encourage two way dialogue where they can easily message, call or email for immediate answers. Allow your visitors to describe their unique needs and receive specialized answers to their needs.

Email communication

You can use email to stay in touch with your clients. Offer to send them valuable information such as newsletters or resources. This is about creating a positive experience, not spamming. Everyone hates spam, even the spammers. Always offer an easy way for them to opt out from future emails so that they are in control.

Social Media

Use popular social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube where you can interact and network with prospective and current clients. There is really thousands of social media tools and websites where people from different market niches gather and converse.

You can also start building relationships and building more online visibility for your business, website or blog, through social networking. The best way to use and engage via social networking is to choose the networks that is most relevant to your market and niche. New social networks are developed every day so you might have to do a bit of research on the ones you will use.

With relationship marketing you are distinguising yourself from the masses. You must be willing to do what others are not will to do. Dare to be different.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Social Media Marketing, Social Networking and relationship marketing.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-30T18:10:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Simple steps to conduct a website analysis

Posted: 29 Nov 2009 10:31 PM PST

We specialize in professional website development and website design and I receive requests frequently from businesses that would like me to look at their website and give an opinion on what I think. I am usually quite surprised on what I find. I always ask six questions before I conduct an analysis of a website.

Initial questions:

Are you happy with your site and online presence?
What is the purpose of your website?
Who do you want to reach with your website?
Where do you want your traffic to originate from?
What are you selling?
What actions do you want from your visitors?

What I look for:

Initial impression

Does the website appeal to targeted customers? Does it give the proper impression based on who your customer is? Obviously you want a very different look and style for your website if you only sell travel packages to Egypt than a Caribbean look and feel. I look at the website from the eyes of your visitor.

Initial message

Will your visitors convey the essential message of your website in the first 3-6 seconds? If not, new visitors are gone in a click. Your visitors should have a clear indication what your website is about. First impressions last. Always mention your services and the advantages of them.

Call to action

Is there a clear path to action? This could be to buy online, call now, download this ebook or request a quote. The “call to action” should always be clear from the home page. The navigation should always be arranged in a logical selling process.

Traffic source

If the website is only expected to receive traffic from the search engines, I check if the website is optimized correctly by looking at the body text, link text, headings, etc. I also check for structural problems and evidence that the website is indexed correctly.

Effective website development and website design needs to produce the results desired. This could be business leads, phone calls or sales. If you are unsure about your website, please ask me for a opinion. Reference this blog posting and let us know the answers to the initial questions above.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-28T18:13:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Is blogging the best answer for your business?

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 11:42 PM PST

Blogging is another form of social media and it is an effective way of expanding your network. With a blog you can broadcast your messages to targeted people that you could not have reached any other way. A business blog allows you to market your business and yourself.

Businesses are quickly adopting blogging as their latest online marketing tool but is it really the best answer for them? Find below a couple of things you should consider before getting started with a blog.

Who

Whom do you want to reach with your blog? If you are focused on local business, you want to reach potential customers in your local area. Use community names in your blog.

How old is your targeted audience? If they are 60+, you might only have a small number of people that will read your blog. If they are under 50, then there’s a very high number who already read and responds to blogs.

Why

What is your motivation? Why do you want a blog? If you enjoy journalling and writing, then blogging will be a natural creative outlet that will fit into your lifestyle.

If you prefer going to the doctor over writing, then blogging is not for you.

Before you get started with your blog, also consider things such as the restrictions in what you can say on your blog. Some companies are regulated and restricted on how they can advertise and promote themselves.

If you deal with military secrets or financial products, then blogging might not be for you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a avid promoter of blog development and social media marketing but it isn’t the best answer for every business.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-27T18:11:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

How to get more targeted traffic to your website

Posted: 26 Nov 2009 09:23 PM PST

Most online business have one common need and that is to get more targeted traffic to their website. More traffic = more sales and business leads. The web is also one of the primary advertising mediums for most home based businesses.

You might have a great looking website with all the bells and whistles, but without targeted traffic and interested visitors, the best looking website is useless. I’ll say that again – useless.

The best answer is to do two things.

Optimize your website to be search engine friendly (SEO – on page ).
Optimize and use a blog with it’s RSS (real simple syndication) links.

By using Search Engine Optimization combined with Blog Marketing (Social Media), you will be able to get good rankings on Google and this will equal to more targeted traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO can improve the volume of quality traffic to your website or online profile. Selecting keyword phrases that your targeted customers will actually use are the foundation for Search Engine Optimization. This is the first step that will ultimately determine if SEO will turn into online sales or business leads.

I’m not talking about the keywords in your Meta content but about the keywords and keyword phrases found in the content of your website.

Make sure that your keywords and content is always relevant. To have a baseline, assign no more than four keyword phrases to each page you want to optimize.

On page Search Engine Optimization requires text that the search engines can index – content is king. Use your keyword phrases 1-2 times each in the top 25% of the body text. You can also use the keyword phrases in the links, headings and any bulleted lists of your website.

Blog Marketing

To have a separate blog that links (link-bait) back to your website can quickly produce valuable links that the search engines will quickly recognise. You don’t have to set-up your blog on a separate domain, rather create a sub-domain for it eg http://blog.yourdomain.com or http://www.yourdomain.com/blog.

Using your targeted keywords as a guide, write a minimum of 3 blog postings each week. Each posting should be between 250-500 words in length. Use your keyword phrases in each blog posting title and in the text of the posting. Be sure to link back to the most relevant page on your website with the keywords you have selected. The search engines will quickly detect these links and each link will help your rankings.

These methods I have just explained is a combination of on page Search Engine Optimization together with Blog Marketing. This could be more powerful to increase targeted traffic to your website than doing either individually.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Website Marketing, Search Engine Optimization or Blog Marketing.

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-25T18:08:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Reasons why some websites fail

Posted: 25 Nov 2009 01:13 AM PST

Reports in the past has shown that 80-90% of all new business websites and blogs will fail to yield successful results. What is even more frightening is that most of these websites could succeed if planned and executed correctly. Why do these new websites fail? What goes wrong?

Find below a couple of reasons some new websites fail.

Design over strategy

Companies often spend most of their time planning how their website design will look. They don’t have a clue who their targeted audience will be or planned their messaging or a “call to action”. A good website design always starts with a strategy. Focus first on creating your stream of leads, online sales or quotation requests.

No Traffic plan

To think that you can only build your website and then visitors will flock to it is not true. It doesn’t work for business websites. Decide and plan your traffic sources such as organic searches, referral traffic or pay per click before you start with the website design of your site. Organic SEO is much more effective when designed into a website from the start.

It’s really not about you

Usually the websites that brags about how great you are will quickly turn off visitors. People are searching for solutions to their problems. By boasting your achievements won’t solve your visitors problems. Don’t tell them about your new car, rather how to fix theirs. Organize your website so that the answers are easily found. Avoid industry jargon and use plain english.

Flashy graphics

Most Flash only websites looks cool but they are usually slow loading and search engines can’t index their content. There are some solutions to this as I have pointed out in one of my previous posts: SEO deep linking for Flash and Ajax.

It is ok to use Flash elements in your website for videos, banners, etc mixed with text content. Keep your website simple and focus on solving a problem for your visitor. After all “content is king”.

Low cost design

Don’t hire your best friend to design and develop your business website. They might receive some great experience from it but you can sacrifice your business image and the ability to drive targeted traffic to your website. Hire a professional development firm that is experienced in both website development, website design. and website traffic strategies.

Your website is a powerful business tool if utilized correctly. Don’t let your website fail.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-23T18:11:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Why small companies fail to market themselves on the web

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 09:36 PM PST

In the last couple of years, almost everything has changed in marketing. Traditional marketing with print yellow pages and newspapers is no longer effective. Yet most small companies have failed to convert to internet and website marketing according to a study done by Webvisible and Nielson in 2009.

63% of small business owners and consumers turns to the web for information about local companies.
Only 44% of small business have their own website.
Businesses that have a website spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.

This study shows clearly the need for small businesses to establish themselves online, yet 56% of them aren’t. Why do most small businesses fail to establish and market themselves online? What could the reason be for holding them back?

Busy

Small business owners don’t have the time to focus on learning this method (online) of marketing. Most of the time they spend their entire day to keep the business running. After all they are the expert in their field and business.

Skills

Internet and website marketing is a new technology for many business owners. Trends and changes on the web happens at light speed. Most younger business owners and employees have an advantage here because they have been around technology and computers for most of their lives.

Confusion

There is so much information, opinions and misinformation out there. How can inexperienced novices succeed when the experts can’t agree? It is sometimes hard to get a grasp on things.

Fear

Usually people are afraid of what they don’t understand. Afraid of using a unfamiliar technology and presenting a poor image. Afraid of being taken advantage of. It can be tough jumping in when you don’t know the rules.

What can these small businesses do? As a business owner you don’t need to become a Internet Marketing Expert. The basic marketing principals are the same ones that have worked for decades.

These principals are just applied to a new technology. To start, lean the basics and how the strategies work. Hire someone to do the technical work. Let them explain in detail what will be done.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding website marketing.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-20T18:12:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Building a career with blogging

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 03:51 AM PST

Blogging is a great way to expand your network and to get in front of people that you could not reach any other way. With a blog you can market yourself by using many blog marketing strategies used by companies around the globe. The best social networking strategies revolves around a blog.

Find a couple of tips below on how you can use a blog to market yourself, your services and your products.

Create a network

Write a blog that consists of your industry and career field. By writing interesting original and informative content, you are encouraging people to comment and to visit your blog regularly. This can quickly develop your network. You can develop stronger relationships by exchanging ideas than you ever could with only exchanging business cards.

Expand your knowledge

When you are driven to write 3 or more great blog post every week, you are seeking information. You will also listen more deeply because you are knowledgeable about your blog topic. You are the expert.

Get job offers

The results that your blog produces can give employers insight into who you are and what you think. Most employers today will Google your name to see what comes up if you applied for a job. If you have a blog, this is usually the first result that will be shown to them.

Move up the corporate ladder

Blogging positions you for growth within your current company. You will become recognized as the expert in your field and you will have more new ideas. This will also show that you have initiative and discipline in writing your blog.

Do what you love

Turn your existing hobby or interest into a blog with an eye towards a career change. Your blogging will expand your knowledge tremendously and you are busy with the creation of your own network. Always work to become known as an expert and the job offers will come to you. A natural by product of pursuing what you love to do is expertise.

Create Awareness

With your own personal brand you are establishing yourself in your industry and you are creating your own opportunities to network. People will follow you if you provide quality content that answers questions.

A blog is a powerful business tool and influencer. Use it correctly to build relationships with your readers. Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding blog development or social networking.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-17T18:12:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Social Media Marketing and the internet viewing public

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 01:09 AM PST

The internet viewing public has changed and shifted to social media and trust based social networks and channels. Business marketing is following this new trend.

You can find millions of conversations happening every day through various social media channels. This is all done by a highly involved audience that engages and interacts around focused topics.

Individuals and companies that takes advantage of this trend can connect to their targeted audience and reap the benefits of increased visibility, increased sales, increased business leads and brand awareness. Companies must re visit their marketing assumptions to take full advantage of the internet evolution of Web 2.0 and social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is very different than traditional marketing and businesses must understand this. Social Media Marketing is about broadcasting valuable content and about creating trust and relationships. Not about sales. If it is used correctly together with social media optimization (SMO), the sales and business leads will follow.

Social media allows you to make your presence known on targeted social media channels and to promote your brand. These social media channels includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Digg, blogs, etc. The media can include video, images, audio or text.

Every social media channel has its own rules of strategies and engagement that needs to be developed for each of your social media marketing strategies. Each of these channels allows you to access audiences that shares the same interest and viewpoints.

What your business can expect from social media marketing.

Recognition and attention for your company brands.
Links to help with your SEO strategy.
Increased targeted visitor traffic.
The interaction with prospective clients and customers.
Increased business leads through brand awareness.
Increased visibility.

Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization is not something businesses can ignore anymore. It is a powerful marketing trend that more and more people are using everyday. Why miss the oppertunity to engage with your clients and potential customers?

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding social media optimization.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-16T18:06:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Tips to start your Social Media campaign

Posted: 15 Nov 2009 10:51 PM PST

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is used to increase the visibility of your brand, services and products. It is all about the interaction with people that could be interested in anything that your company has to offer.

Social Media with the right Social Media Optimization (SMO) can increase targeted traffic to your website or blog through links and you can get better search engine rankings through it as well.

Planning is the most import rule before venturing on a Social Media Marketing campaign. What is your objectives? Who do you want to reach? How will things be different after your Social Media Marketing campaign?

Find below a couple of tips that will help you with your Social Media Marketing campaign.

Purpose

What will be your purpose with it? What do you want to accomplish? Do you only want inbound links? Subscribers to your newsletter? Improve your brand awareness? Always settle for one primary purpose and 2-3 secondary ones. You can set measurable goals for your purposes and objectives.

Your Audience

Who do you want to broadcast your message to? What interests your targeted customers? Where do they spend their time discussing, learning and reading online? Research who you will be targeting.

Which Tools

Research the tools you will be using. Will you just be using blogs or forums? Are you only going to target selective social networks? Are answers being searched on LinkedIn or Facebook? These locations are usually the place where you will want to start your Social Media Marketing campaign.

Participation

Participate actively via social media and become part of the community. The amount of influence you exert will be based on how actively you join in the conversations and contribute. Join in on forum discussions, comment on blogs, follow and Tweet on Twitter and be active using social networking. Why not create your own blog and create your own community?

Monitor

Listening is a must for Social Media Marketing. Use Google Alerts or other paid tools to track your brand mentions, social media awareness, blog conversations or Tweets. If your goal is purely for search engine optimization, monitor your rankings and links.

To be successfull with Social Media and to increase your brand awareness takes time and planning. Treat your Social Media Marketing campaign exactly the same as you would any other marketing campaign.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Social Media Marketing.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-13T18:12:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

POST: A good approach to Social Media Marketing

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 11:00 PM PST

What do most people and companies do wrong when they start marketing through social media channels? They lack specific objectives and a overall plan. They usually don’t know who they will be targeting. Forrester, a marketing research company created the acronym POST.

This acronym is a methodology for companies to enter into social media marketing.

The POST method helps to address common questions like “should my company have a presence on Twitter?” or “why am I not getting a respons from my blog?”.

The POST method stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology.

People

This is all about reaching your targeted customer. What are their demographics and interests? Who are they? What social media channels are they using? If you are targeting college students, use social networks like Facebook.

Objectives

What is your goals? Do you want to build trust and awareness? Credibility? Decide on your objectives before you decide which social media technology you will be using. Research how you will be measuring your results.

Strategy

How will things be different for your company afterwards? Will you have lasting relationships with your customers? Do you want people to talk about your products? Plan your strategy on how social media will affect your company and services.

Technology

After you have decided on People, Objectives and your Strategy, decide on the best social media application and channel to use. If you will be blogging, what software will you be using? Are you going to use Wikis, YouTube or Facebook? Maybe you can create your own community?

Social Media Marketing and optimization takes time and dedication. Plan and research everything before venturing on social media channel without knowing the implications.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding Social Media Marketing or Social Media Optimization.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-12T18:10:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Build trust with your website

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 01:10 AM PST

Most web surfers today is very sceptical. To make your website trustworthy and to build credibility, it is absolutely vital to take your website seriously as the web is an impersonal medium.

If your website does not appear professional or credible, potential buyers will leave in seconds. There’s millions of websites. What will make users stay on your website?

Your website is the building blocks for establishing yourself online. Most of the time, people will be looking at your online profile before conducting any business with you. This is human nature. People want to know who they are dealing with. Why not present them with a solution to problems they might be having?

Find below a couple of tips to build trust with your website

Clean Design

Start your website with a clean design. A clean website design with useful information will make your visitors interested. Always avoid confusing your visitors. The navigation, design and information should be clear and to the point. Understand what your visitors are looking for and help them to accomplish their goals.

Professional Development

If you have a big website with allot of functionality, keep the website development professional. Always guide your visitors on logical steps on what to do next. Make sure everything works 100%.

Quality Content

Always keep your content unique and informative. The images and the words you use will the reflect the quality that you provide. The key is to show what great value your service or product is.

Assure your clients

Always assure your clients that your company is trustworthy. You can do this by including a privacy policy, guarantee or a return policy on your website. Join trusted organizations and place their logos on your website. You can also clearly show your address and phone number.

Testimonials

People will trust what other people are saying about you and your services. Positive customers that are specific are the most powerful. Include some of these testimonials on your website to increase your credibility.

A website is a powerful business tool if utilized correctly. It is your image on the web. Leave a comment below if you want more information regarding website design and website development.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-11T18:13:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Is Social Media Marketing Changing SEO?

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 09:20 PM PST

It has been proved time and time again that a search engine optimized website that employs a clear language, unique rich content and semantically correct mark-up that can be interpreted by human readers is going to offer a better user experience on the web.

An optimized website will also be ranked higher on the search engines if all the elements are utilized correctly – on page SEO and off page SEO.

What I’m talking about here is the on page SEO with all the elements directly associated with the on page factors of the website – keywords, unique content, title tags, heading tags, etc and the off page elements that includes content marketing, backlinks, etc.

With the boom of social media marketing and all the Web 2.0 tools available, could the same results be obtained just by engagement through social media channels? Most of the content management systems and blogging engines freely available on the net already comes out with a “out of the box on page SEO” solution – with a bit of tweaking of course.

With all these tools available you still need to cater for all the off page SEO elements.

Why Social Media?

The most important aspect of social media is the notion of reputation and recommendation. Before the boom of the internet, we relied on our local social circle for advice and guidance. With the web came this power of information and we had access to about anything you can think of, information wise of course.

Users have become smart. They are not searching for information on the internet any more, but filtering it to find exactly what they are looking for.

You can find thousands of results with only a single search query, but how do you find the results that is most relative or informative? Once again we are at step one looking at our social circle for guidance in these matters. The only difference is that our social circles now is much larger than what they were before the internet boom.

Is SEO still important?

So you might be wondering if SEO is still important and it is. You still need to find the initial finder of the information. Search engine optimizing a website for search engines can help users find and categorize content. Search is not only for the discovery of new content, it can also serve to recover previously visited content. Yet if you don't recall the exact terminology on the site, or all the content of the site is cloaked in images, your task will be more difficult.

Social media marketing used together with SEO is a great way to build trust and credibility and at the same time increase targeted visitor traffic. The old saying “content is king” is still valid even though social media experts say “conversation is king”. In order to start a good conversation, good content is needed to talk about. This shows that SEO is still important to get high rankings.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding social media marketing or SEO.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-10T18:15:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Your website is your image to the world

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 01:08 AM PST

It is vital that a website should not just be developed professionally, but it should also have a good design that is visually appealing to your visitors. It is usually the first impression that future prospects of yours will have before doing any business with you.

A professional website has many benefits for any company – increase your sales, business leads and conversion rates.

The design of your website is meant to ensure emotion and affect the visitor at a subconscious level. Why is this so important? People will shop logically, but purchase emotionally.

The look and feed of your website sets the mood of your readers and readies them to listen. It defines your image as a serious player in your industry. It is the emotional and visual element that tells your visitor that they have arrived at the right place. This includes the organization of all the elements on your website to guide your visitors to what is important.

Would you eat at a restaurant that was dirty and had a pile of dirty dishes everywhere on the tables? Would you buy a car from a dealer that only had wrecked cars between the cars for sale? I won't and you shouldn't either.

When developing your website, it is very important to use a design to highlight and enhance your message. Keep the design elegant with a strong focus on helping the content to tell its story.

What does your website tell your visitors about your business and services? Does it tell them that you are a professional that knows exactly what to do? Your website is a direct reflection of your company and the products or services that you provide. A professional website with a good design can make or break a business lead.

Website development is an art, not a service that everyone can do. You won't visit a dentist when you have broken your arm or leg. You will go to your doctor. The same principal applies for your website. Professional website developers knows what they are doing.

If you are in the process of redesigning your website or developing a new one, be sure to make it stand out from the crowd.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding website development.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-09T18:03:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Monetize your blog or website for extra income

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 11:53 PM PST

Did you know that if you have a website or a blog you can let it generate a stream of income besides the marketing of your services and products? The web is full of opportunities for the entrepreneur.

Even though monetizing your blog and website could generate extra income for you or your business, don’t expect overnight success. Once again it comes down to how well your website is ranked, and how many visitors it targets and receives.

You won’t generate an income with your website if no one visits your website. Be sure that your website is search engine optimized – on page and off page. Your website needs to be visible and by that I actually mean reachable.

A great way to get targeted traffic to your website or blog is through social media. With SM you can also build trust and credibility with your brand name and services. Nothing could have a greater impact for your business if thousands of people can market your products and services for you.

Once you are receiving a satisfying number of visitors to your website, you can begin by monetizing it. There’s a couple of ways you can go about doing this and find a couple below.

Google Adsense:

Sign up for a Google Adsense account and place Google ads on your website or blog. These are relevant context search engine ads where you are paid every time someone clicks on one of the ads.

Text Links

This is a controversial tactic, selling text links for link popularity, but perfectly acceptable if "no-follow" tags are added. Once your blog has a decent ranking, sell one-way text links to webmasters who have niche relevant websites.

Video

YouTube has implemented “Google Adsense” onto their videos where if someone clicks on the add on the video, you will get paid. Another service Thenewsroom.com allows you to find and embed videos on your website. When video news content with an advertisement is played by your viewers, you'll earn a flat-rate CPM (cost per thousand plays).

Affiliate Marketing

Be a middle man! Receive a commission every time one of your readers ends up buying products that you advertise. This includes companies like Amazon and other affiliate campaigns.

Blogging

Contract to write postings on your own blog. This can include product reviews and postings with links to sponsored websites. You can get writing assignments from services such as PayperPost, Review Me and LoudLaunch.

Ghost Writing

Take writing assignments for businesses that don't have the time or skills to write their own basic blog content. Here you will write for their blog.

These are some of the basic ways how you can generate an income with your website or blog. Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding this process or search engine optimization to increase the traffic to your website or blog.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-06T18:16:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

How to measure Social Media success

Posted: 05 Nov 2009 10:23 PM PST

How do you measure your success with social media marketing? Many new companies are joined this “new” trend with much enthusiasm to reach new prospects and to engage in conversation. The only question is, how do you measure if it is successful?

A survey that was done in August 2009 by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education shows that 84% of marketers aren’t measuring ROI (return on investment) on their social media marketing campaigns. 40% of the respondents didn’t believe it could be measured. You can view a summary of the survey here: Social Media Measurement Lags Adoption.

Many companies that are measuring their success with social media in their campaigns are checking for direct results. These will usually only show improvements, but they don’t translate directly into ROI.

View below what these companies are looking fore:

Number of Twitter followers and Retweets
Page views
Brand searches and mentions
Facebook fans
Unique visitors
Bounce rate on blog and website
Search ranking improvements
Comments together with trackbacks
Incoming links

Although these are good indicators in showing a campaign’s success, they fail to show if they are yielding ROI. Business owners and managers are looking for financial growth. ROI needs to be tied back to business metrics such as increases in sales, decreases in expenses and profitability.

To tie these metrics together you can create a graph consisting of all the the social media indicators that is showing results over time and then overlay these results with financial results.

To give you a quick example, you can measure an increase of brand mentions by week for the past year against the weekly sales on a company website. This way you might see a direct correlation to an increase in sales and company mentions. The key here is to compare the results from various social media channels to see which one is having the best impact.

Let me know how you measure social media effectiveness in your campaign.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding social media marketing and ways to measure it.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-05T18:12:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Part 3: Social Media Optimization Fundamentals

Posted: 04 Nov 2009 10:14 PM PST

This is the third part in the series Social Media Optimization Fundamentals. Find below links to the other parts.

Social media is huge. If you search on Google for the term “social media”, you will get more than 200 million hits in less than a second. You can find thousands of blogs full of topics regarding social media and hundreds of services measuring it.

There is more than 300 million users of online social media tools and the number is accelerating.

These days if you are looking for a job, most employers will check the obvious social media spaces for more information about you. The same happens in every day when people are searching for more information about you, your brand and your organization.

People want to see who they are dealing with and they can make quick judgements on your ability to effectively represent yourself online.

Usually it takes time and dedication to build your reputation with social media so that it is impressive enough to get the job or business lead that you want. Sometimes when people are interested enough to search (Google) about you, it might be too late to update your social media profiles or open a Facebook account. Your social media presence must already be in place and optimized.

Find below a couple of tips you can use to make yourself known in social media circles.

Photo

Get a good photo of yourself and replace it with the current one you are using. No one wants to see an old photo of you in a suit when “mullets” where the in thing. Most of the times your social media photo will be the new handshake and first impressions last.

LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is a professional social networking service. Find below a couple of tips you can use to bring your LinkedIn profile up to date.

Add your new photo to your profile.
Complete your employment history. This can also be seen as your “work experience”.
Add previous employers to your network.
Find a good group to join. I’ve created a group “Social Media South Africa”.
Get people to write a recommendation for you and do the same for them.

Google Alerts

Create Google Alerts on the topics that are most important to you. Choose the keywords to follow that describes the best what you are looking for. This can lead you to the most active and relevant on-line communities to join. You can also use the alerts to check your own brand, product or service in blogs and on the web.

Bookmarking

Bookmark the top blogs and communities in your space and actively participate on them. Resellers an customers regularly read important blogs by industry. Subscribe to the RSS feed of those blogs so you will be notified of any changes as it happens.

Blogging

Try to create a new blog post at least every second day. If you read a blog by a reseller, post a positive message at the bottom. If you visit a Forum discussing an interesting question, weigh in with your opinion. If you are in a partner community, be as visible as possible.

Social media is not going away and in some countries it is only starting to surface now. Become active using social media before it’s too late.

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding social media optimization or social media marketing.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-04T18:18:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Optimize your pages to get the “yes” action

Posted: 03 Nov 2009 10:41 PM PST

The internet is all full of information. People are usually searching the web for answers or solutions that they are seeking. If the web pages on your website doesn’t give answers and doesn’t provide the information that your visitors are looking for, what is the point of having a website at all?

All of your web pages should consist of information that is clear, concise and optimized. Give users a reason to browse to your website.

Not everyone reads the entire text found on a web page, they scan. Attention spans are short. You always need to capture the attention of your visitor and get them interested to follow through. Most “good” websites are full of interesting advertisements with some benefits and present good information but they don’t ask for a direct and instant response. They might get the visitor interested, but they do not follow through for a successful business or sales deal.

As stated before, people are searching the web for solutions. Most of them are not looking to buy products or services. They buy the solution to their problem. Give your visitors the results that they need.

Remember that most people on the Internet don't read everything on the page, they scan. Attention spans are short. You need to capture the attention of your visitor, get them interested and then follow through with a clear and compelling offer.

Find below a couple of tips to help you with the sales process of a web page.

Web page headline

Grab the attention of your visitors with a compelling headline statement. Don’t be afraid to make the headline entertaining. Get your visitors interested in the headline and then close the deal with your content.

Content

Your content should always be unique and informative. Give your visitors the information that they are seeking. Always avoid unsubstantiated marketing. Format your content to be easily scan-able by including bold text, italics and bullet points for important information found on the page. Use a confident tone with a strong action. Your visitors needs the reassurance that your solution will work for them.

CTA (Call to action)

This is the most important part of your web page. Guide your visitors to what you want them to do. It should be clear if you want them to buy, register, call or sign up. Never make them look and hunt for the next logical steps to take. Always make it clearly visible and never give more than 3 choices or options or you could lose their attention.

By optimizing your pages to get the “yes” action is very important if you want your web pages to be successful. Leave a comment below if you require additional information regarding the optimization of your pages or on page search engine optimization.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-03T18:33:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Google does not use Meta keywords to rank a website

Posted: 02 Nov 2009 11:13 PM PST

I know this is old news but I was speaking to a client of mine a couple of days ago and another web-design company contacted him a week ago suggesting that with the correct Meta data (keywords) in his website pages, they can get him to rank on the first page of the “Google” search engine results for his given keywords and keyword phrases.

Well just to be funny, I’ve sent the “web-design” company a link to the YouTube video where Matt Cutts explains this. Find the video below.

These are the questions that was stated to him. You can find the full list here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?

A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that’s an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?

A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?

A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets.

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?

A: It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.

Well there you have it. Meta data (keywords) are not used to rank your website. Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding this.

Bookmark this

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-11-02T18:20:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Use Social Media to improve your rankings

Posted: 01 Nov 2009 11:10 PM PST

Companies and individuals everywhere wants to jump onto the Social Media trend to market their products and services through conversation. Social Media Marketing (SMM) usually consists of a combination of social networks, video sharing, social bookmarking websites, micro blogging and normal blogging.

Social media marketing can also be used to increase the organic SEO results for your website or blog. Many people using social media doesn’t realise this and it can help to attract targeted visitors to your website.

Organic SEO uses keyword phrases that is found in the headings, links, body text, etc of a web page. To have good organic SEO search results also requires a link building strategy and social media can help with this.

Find below a couple of tips to help you with your Social Media strategy.

Blog

Add a blog to your existing website. By always writing interesting informative topics, your blog can become a natural link magnet from other blogs. Bloggers usually includes natural links to source articles that they reference in their topics and blog posts. Links to your blog that is part of your website will benefit your entire website.

Content

Content is king but so is conversation. By adding a blog to your website allows you to regularly add keyword rich pages to your website. More quality content pages on your site will give the search engines more content to index and it will increase your search traffic. If you have more content it can also provide more potential for attracting links.

Add content that your readers will find interesting and that encourages conversation.

Articles

Create authorative articles and whitepapers on your website. Provide observations of your industry or market and offer advice. With social media marketing, you are the expert in your field and industry. If these articles are good, you will attract good links from other websites and blogs.

Bookmarking

Delicious, Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon are highly authoritive social bookmarking websites which can improve your search engine rankings if used poperly. Add these buttons to your blog to allow your visitors to share your content.

Social media is here to stay on the web. Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding social media marketing.

Bookmark this

Mobile web design myths

Posted: 01 Nov 2009 06:59 AM PST

Found a great presentation “The Myths of Mobile Web Design” about mobile websites and some tips if you are designing a mobile website. The mobile web is growing fast and it is another way to expose yourself.

Mobile websites are different than normal websites found on the web. Cell phones have small screens and usually limited abilities and cannot process large websites full of graphics because most websites are developed and designed for the web, not the mobile web. Cell phones requires simpler websites, smaller in size and with few graphics.

Find the presentation below.

Bookmark this

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-10-30T18:11:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Content marketing with Squidoo

Posted: 29 Oct 2009 11:30 PM PDT

Squidoo is a popular website with social media characteristics where members (sign up is free) can create pages about any topic. This is an excellent way to get additional exposure for your services, products, brand, blog or website. Squidoo is one of those free alternatives that should be used along with a website and a blog.

The biggest challenge small companies face is “getting the word out” and to make them selves known to the world. With Squidoo it is possible! Advetising and marketing can get expensive. Turning to various forms and channels of social media is an excellent and cost affective alternative. You can build trust and credibility by building lasting relationships with social media but it does take time and dedication to get optimal results.

A short background about Squidoo: It was developed by Seth Godin with the idea that nearly everyone is an expert on something. Squidoo allows people to provide information, voice their opinion or recommend products and services that they like. The members of Squidoo are called “Lensmasters” and the pages they create are called “Lenses”.

To give you examples of “Lenses”, have a look at two I have created recently “Why every business needs a website” and “What is Social Media“.

For a “Lens” to be effective it needs to focus on a single topic and should provide valuable information that your targeted readers/customer would find useful.

Find a couple of tips below for creating and optimizing your Squidoo Lens to get the best results from one.

Always focus on a single topic and subject that would be interesting to targeted users.
Visit the popular lenses on Squidoo and research how these Lenses present their information and tell their story.
Choose keywords and keyword phrases carefully. Research the keyword phrases that people are searching for and that describes your subject.
Be sure to make your content informative and unique. Once again – uniqueness is the key! Write your content on something that people would like to read and even show their friends.
Bookmark your new lens with popular social bookmarking websites to get the word out about your new “Lens”. Bookmarking and linking will help promoting your lens and move it up in the rankings on Squidoo, bringing you even more traffic.
Use StumbleUpon and Digg to give it a thumbs up.
Blog about your “Lens” and link to it.

Squidoo is a way for companies to improve their brand and to reach new audiences. To get the best results from Squidoo, use it together with your blog or website.

Leave a comment below or contact us if you require more information regarding Squidoo or Social Media Marketing.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-10-29T18:08:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Optimize your blog postings to get more user traffic

Posted: 28 Oct 2009 05:19 AM PDT

A successful blog can improve your organic search engine rankings faster than any other method. All popular blogging systems includes an automated RSS (Real Simple Synidation) file that gets updated every time you post a new topic. With the RSS feed plugged into your blog, you can broadcast your material and marketing message to other websites and RSS aggregators fast.

Blogs and links from them are usually given more importance by the search engines than normal websites. Optimized blog writing is a key part of blog SEO marketing and to gain more targeted website traffic.

By saying all this, how you write your blog topics and postings is very important to get the best organic search engine rankings. Find below a couple of tips and elements for good organic SEO blog postings.

Keywords

Research and create a blogging plan that is highly focused on keywords and content. Choose no more than 6 keyword phrases and it is best if these phrases are selected around a single concept or subject. Use the same keywords in the tags of your post as this can help RSS aggregators to place your topic in the best category.

Title

Use one of your keyword phrases within the title of your blog post. Search engines tend to give high importance to the keywords found in a blog title. Remember that when you write your blog post topic, you want to attract readers and make sure your post gets indexed by the search engines. Same with normal Search Engine Optimization – write for humans, not robots.

Prominence

Use the targeted keywords you have chosen at least once in the first 25 words of your blog posting. Search engines places a higher value on text used near the beginning of a blog posting. Never overuse your selected keyword phrases. To have a good measure, use the selected key phrase 3 times with a blog posting of between 300-400 words.

Links

Link to other topics you have created and other blogs in your postings. Use the exact text phrase and link these keyword phrases to the most relevant pages on the website you are linking to. This can boost your rankings for those keywords – if of course you are linking within your blog post to your own website or online profile.

Blog Posting Length

Try to keep your blog postings between 300-450 words. Search engines generally prefer longer postings, while human readers prefer shorter postings. This is due to people scanning the contents of a blog to what they are looking for. People aren’t searching the web any more but filtering it to find exactly the information that they seek.

As stated before, blogs can greatly boost your search engine rankings by optimizing the content found on your blog postings. Blogging together with social media marketing takes time and dedication but the benefits you can gain from one over exceeds the time spent by optimizing it.

Leave a comment below if you require additional information regarding blogs.

Bookmark this

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-10-27T18:10:00.001+07:00

Web Marketing and SEO Blog

Reach more people with a mobile website

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 11:00 PM PDT

More people are starting to browse the web with mobile devices as it is now a “on the move” business tool. Usually when people are not in their offices, they are not near a computer and so they cannot reach you online. This is false! By having a mobile website you are opening your doors to users accessing the web from a mobile device such as a cell phone.

Most companies have a regular website but not a mobile website. A mobile website (light version of a normal website) is optimized to be viewable on the mobile web and a cell phone. Very few businesses today have a website that can be easily viewed on a mobile phone.

A dedicated optimized mobile website is needed if you want your “website” to be displayed on cell phones. Mobile websites are much smaller and usually have fewer pages. The message on your “mobile” pages should also be more focused what your mobile audience wants to know.

The mobile web is much lighter than the normal web. Desktop computers connects to the web through a stable high speed connection. Cell phones by their nature have to connect on the move. Connections are transferred from cell tower to cell tower and are affected by carrier coverage. This makes it quite limited in bandwidth.

Even though to view your website depends on network coverage, by having one you are enabling yourself to be found easily.

Reasons for having a dedicated mobile website.

If your company depends on local customers.
If your company depends on advertising.
If your prospects want to get information on the go.

The mobile web is still young but it is growing fast. To be the leader in your market and niche, it is highly recommended to get a dedicated mobile website.

I have been using the mobile web for a couple of years now and I have optimized this blog to be “mobile” ready. Browse to our blog from your cell phone and you will see. This helps me answering my visitors comments when I’m not in front of my computer. A mobile blog that I can access anywhere!

Leave a comment below if you require more information regarding mobile websites.

Bookmark this

Activate your Email Subscription to: Web Marketing and SEO Blog

2009-10-27T14:47:00.001+07:00

Hello there,

You recently requested an email subscription to Web Marketing and SEO Blog.
We can't wait to send the updates you want via email, so please click the
following link to activate your subscription immediately:

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailconfirm?k=jysGYMWWf_S0qbhwhTIL94ZuXII

(If the link above does not appear clickable or does not open a browser
window when you click it, copy it and paste it into your web browser's
Location bar.)